The Man Stalking Me Said Stop Working Alone, and the Kind Vet Was the One Who Let My Tire Down novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cup on the Hood
At 2:40 a.m. Maija finds a man in her lot with her coffee order on her car, hears him say he wants her to stop working alone, and photographs his plate and calls the sheriff.
At 2:40 in the morning the back-door camera showed me a man looking straight up into the lens.
I had three plows out on the county map and one radio crackling about a jackknifed truck on Highway 53.
I did not need a fourth problem.
The camera covers the employee lot behind the garage, one sodium light on a pole and a long slope of fresh snow.
The man stood at the very edge of the light, hatless, in a dark wool coat, with snow collecting on his shoulders.
He did not move.
I had seen him on that monitor four nights out of the last eleven.
Always the same place, always the same stillness, and never once had he come toward the door.
I told the plow driver on Highway 53 to hold his position.
Then I leaned closer to the screen.
On the hood of my gray Subaru, in the middle of the snow, sat a paper cup.
Steam rose from it.
I pulled the pepper spray out of my desk drawer, the little black canister my supervisor had made me sign for in October.
I unlocked the back door and went out into the cold with my thumb on the safety.
The snow squeaked under my boots.
The man was big, taller than I'd judged from the screen, with heavy shoulders and a close dark beard.
He stood perfectly easy, hands loose at his sides.
He did not come closer, and that was almost worse.
"Miss Kallio," he said.
His voice was low and even, the kind that never needs to rise.
"Your left rear tire has been losing air since Tuesday.
"There's a station on Grand that stays open all night.
"Have it looked at before you drive to Hermantown tomorrow."
I had never told a soul in Duluth that I drove to Hermantown on Saturdays.
I had never told anyone why.
My thumb pressed the safety off.
"Step back," I said.
He didn't move forward.
He raised one hand, slowly, palm open, and pointed past me at the tire.
I had put my own hand flat on the car roof to steady myself.
His fingers came down toward it and stopped an inch from mine.
I felt the heat of them in the freezing air.
I didn't pull away, and I didn't know why I didn't.
His hand dropped.
Something went across his face and was gone, and I could not have told you what it was.
I looked at the cup on my hood.
"That's mine?" I said.
"It's yours."
I picked it up with my free hand and lifted the lid.
Black coffee, and two sugars not yet melted into the bottom.
It is how I have taken it since I was nineteen.
I had not told anyone in this city that, either.
Fear came up my back, cold and exact.
"You've been standing outside my work four nights," I said.
"You know my route, my tire and my name.
"Who are you?"
He looked at me for a while, with snow on his lashes and his eyes pale in the sodium light.
"Someone who would very much like you to stop working this shift alone," he said.
That was all.
He turned, walked to a black sedan parked at the far edge of the lot with its lights off, and opened the door.
He did not get in.
He stood with one hand on the roof and waited.
It took me a moment to understand that he was waiting for me to go inside.
I stood in the snow with my coffee going cold in one hand and my pepper spray in the other.
Then I went back through the door and locked it.
On the monitor he got into the car, and the car did not start.
He sat there in the dark with the engine off.
My hands were shaking, and I made them stop.
I sat down at the desk, pulled up the camera, and zoomed in on the sedan's plate.
I took a photograph of the screen with my phone.
The plate was clear.
A plow driver asked on the radio whether I was still with him, and I said yes and sent him on to Highway 53.
Then I picked up my phone again.
I had come north to Duluth to be nobody's, to a city where no one knew the name on my driver's license or what had happened on Highway 169.
I had moved once already, and I was not going to do it again.
I dialed the sheriff's non-emergency line.
"St. Louis County Sheriff," a tired woman said.
"I'd like to report a stalker," I said, and read her the plate.
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